An Ant Colony System for Passenger Assignment and Route Design of Urban Customized Bus With Flexible Pick-Ups and Drop-Offs

초록

Urban customized bus (UCB) has become an important mode of urban transportation in recent years. To further enhance the applicability of UCB, we develop a UCB model that accommodates flexible pick-ups and drop-offs in this article. In our model, when a bus passes through a station, it can drop off passengers whose destination is exactly this station and pick up new passengers as long as constraints are satisfied. By eliminating fixed boarding and alighting regions that were commonly adopted in prior studies, we can provide travel services for both prebooked and real-time orders across broader temporal and spatial ranges. Under such a scenario, it is more challenging to decide when and where to pick up which passenger with which bus, and which route the bus chooses. To solve these intractable problems, we proposed an approach including passenger assignment and route design. For passenger assignment, we devise an ant colony system (ACS) method and a greedy method to assign prebooked and real-time passengers to buses, respectively. ACS represents the correlation among different passengers numerically through a pheromone matrix and updates it iteratively based on the good results. Therefore, prebooked passengers with higher correlations are more likely to be assigned to the same buses. The greedy method always selects passengers with the highest heuristic value to have a fast response in real-time passenger assignment. For route design, we adapt a Dijkstra-based greedy method to efficiently design routes for each bus in both static and dynamic situations. At last, experiments based on both generated data and real data demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method. © 2013 IEEE.

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